While the heroes saving the day makes for a feel good show, it’s never a cakewalk. Besides the bad guys targeting each week’s Person of Interest, the good guys have to deal with the ongoing threat from a cabal of dirty cops as well as the machinations of the government agency that used to control the machine.

It all makes for great entertainment, because the good guys always win and all the scariness is limited to sixty minutes on the small screen. In the real world such government stories are rarely that entertaining. What makes them lack entertainment value in the real world is that the good guys don’t always win and there’s that small issue of who gets to decide who are the good guys in the first place.

Although Person of Interest is fiction, the idea of a Machiavellian government that seeks to manipulate events, extinguish opposition and deceive its citizenry certainly isn’t. In real life we are seeing just such a government emerge right in front of us. Not that it hasn’t been there for years, because it has, but up until now it was largely cloaked from sight for those depending on the fourth estate to tell them what to see.

Now the onion is beginning to peel. Today Washington is overwhelmed with scandals of the Obama administration seeking to use bully pulpit and the police power of government to effect its political ends. From the constantly shifting talking points of the Benghazi story to the Justice Department seizing AP records, to the EPA head seeking to hide her correspondence to the IRS muzzling groups opposing President Obama, it seems like every day brings a new story of deceitfulness and manipulation.

As much as I’d love to see the Obama administration run out of Washington, they are largely footnotes in the bigger story here. That bigger story is actually quite simple: Big government.

Big government is a bad thing. Big government in the hands of manipulative, pernicious, vain and self righteous bureaucrats and politicians is a worse thing. That is exactly what we have today with a giant all powerful government and an administration that sees itself as all knowing, infallible and beyond scrutiny or accountability.

While part of the solution may be holding Barack Obama and his minions responsible for their despicable actions, that alone does not solve the problem. The same machine with a different operator is just as dangerous, just perhaps to different people. Indeed, the citizens of the United States should not be at the mercy of one man’s or one administration’s propensity for honesty in order to exercise their rights and pursue their happiness. And that idea should apply to everyone, whether a progressive or a libertarian and everyone in between.

The solution to solving the problem we are currently facing is not to be found in throwing the rascals out. The solution is to pare back government to its Constitutional limits, pare it back to such a degree that it does not hold in its arbitrary hands the keys to a citizen’s success or failure or their ability to live their lives or exercise their rights.

The IRS can only threaten citizens because it controls the tax code and has the police power of the government to enforce its capricious rulings. Not only does it control the tax code, it has made that code so byzantine that no one – including its own agents – knows how to interpret it. Replace the income tax with the Fair Tax and you eviscerate the IRS’s ability to intimidate and coerce citizens.

Similarly, the EPA can only dictate a citizen’s prosperity or poverty because it too has the police power of government to enforce its arbitrary judgments. What’s more, over its forty year history the EPA has morphed itself from regulating pollution to regulating virtually anything in the economy that moves, manufactures or energizes. Similar unbounded overreach can be found throughout the government from the SEC to OSHA to the Justice Department.

Across the board the federal government should be winnowed to its bare Constitutional bones. Getting the unaccountable government out of the politics and patronage businesses will once again allow citizens to pursue happiness as they define it without making them hostages to the capricious whims of bureaucrats and politicians.

Might it not be fitting that the Obama administration was brought down by the weight of its own arrogance? That the IRS was felled by its own illegal attempts to hobble groups opposed to IRS overreach? That the march to ever bigger government was reversed as a result of big unaccountable government?

Samuel Adams once said: “If ever time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin.” He was no doubt talking about the Tea Party movement.

The first aspect of this failure has to do with the run-up to September 11th. Given terrorist’s general penchant for anniversaries and the fact that September 11th is such a trophy date for them, the Obama administration should have had every American embassy and consulate on the highest security level possible, with terrorist friendly places like Libya, practically on lockdown. Add to that the chaos associated with the fledgling government and Libya should have been ground zero for extra security measures.

Sadly, it was not. The State Department, in the specific person of Hillary Clinton, denied repeated requests for increased security. Indeed the American mission at Benghazi “was like a cardboard building, there wasn’t even bullet proof glass” and security personnel “were not even allowed to have bullets”.

The second aspect of failure at Benghazi was the response to the attacks themselves. The attack on the American compound began on September 11th at 9:40 PM local time, 3:40 Eastern time. In addition to dozens of people storming the front entrance to the compound the attack included small arms fire, mortars and RPG rounds. By 6:00 AM local time the attacks on the compound and the annex were essentially over and the survivors were being transported to the airport. During the 8 hour siege no support came from outside of Libya – although a six man security team from Tripoli (including 2 DOD employees) arrived at 1:30 AM to help evacuate personnel and retrieve bodies of those killed, including Ambassador Stevens. There was however never any military support sent. Of note is the fact that 3 hours after the attacks began, the Secretary of Defense ordered anti-terrorism security teams sent from Spain, but five hours later, by which time the attacks were over, they had not even gotten off of the ground. More consequentially however is the fact that prior to the attack on the annex a Special Forces unit in Tripoli was preparing to fly to Benghazi. They too never got off the ground because they were told to stand down, that they couldn’t go because they didn’t have authority. This is in stark contrast to the administration’s claim that no one was ever given a stand down order and that all available resources were used.

The third aspect of failure, and the most consequential for the American people as a whole, although certainly not for the families of the victims of the attacks, is the obfuscation and cover-up. Coming just 2 months before the presidential election, Barack Obama made the conscious decision to lie to the American people. Indeed, in an attempt to further his administration’s fiction that terrorism was on the wane and that America was once again loved around the world, Barack Obama tried to pretend as if nothing of consequence had happened as he jetted off to Vegas on a campaign stop. What’s worse, five days later, despite knowledge to the contrary, he trotted Susan Rice out in front of the nation to lie and blame the events in Benghazi on a YouTube video. Later, Hillary Clinton claimed that she had never denied any increased security requests from Libya. Today, eight months later we know that both were lies.

What is particularly disturbing about the events surrounding Benghazi is that they are sequential, i.e. they compound one another. After any one of the three they could have decided to make good, honest decisions. They didn’t and taken as a whole the Benghazi affair is a disaster. We all know that mistakes get made in life and in any organization, government or otherwise. As they say, nobody is perfect and we should not expect our politicians to be so. And we don’t. We do however expect them to be competent and honest. In this case Barack Obama and his administration showed themselves to be not only imperfect, but incompetent, dishonest, and most of all, self-servingly callous with the lives of four Americans who were in Benghazi serving as representatives of the American people.

It’s possible for Americans to believe that in the chaos of Libya in the summer of 2012, that somehow security measures were not quite what they should have been or that the security in place seemed adequate but turned out to fail in a perfect storm of events. After all, “No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy”.

What’s not possible for Americans to believe however is that in the midst of a raging battle of unknown duration, the President of the United States would refuse to allow Special Forces to attempt to protect and rescue those Americans who were being attacked. From the very beginning the administration understood the gravity of the situation – both on the ground and for their campaign. Rather than jettison the fiction of a terrorism free middle east, the president choose to order reinforcements to stand down. Additionally, later pronouncements that military aid from outside Libya would not have arrived in time are simply absurd. As far as we know the terrorists do not punch clocks for an 8 hour shift of causing mayhem. By definition a terrorist attack timetable is not coordinated with the victims beforehand. In the middle of the battle there was no way of knowing if it would last 5 more hours or 5 more days. In that light the decision to refuse reinforcements shows Barack Obama to be at best an incompetent Commander in Chief and at worst a narcissistic politician for whom his power is the only issue of concern.

Finally there is the cover-up. Every American understands that safety and security are messy affairs and that tragedy occurs and people die, often brave people who have willingly borne the burden of defending us. While Americans might be able to accept as human the misjudgments in preparation in the run up to September 11th, and while they might reluctantly accept the fact that they have elected an incompetent Commander in Chief, they will not, or at least should not, accept a president who, when four Americans die on his watch, lies to the American people about the cause so that he can win reelection. At some point you have to ask, is there nothing that rises above politics? What is the body count that separates the president from the candidate? What if the number had been 8 victims? Would 16 victims have been enough bloodshed to cause him to delay his trip to Las Vegas? Had 20 Americans died would they still have dared to blame it on the video?

Barack Obama has shown himself to be an incompetent president, an ineffectual Commander in Chief and most of all a pernicious politician. One has to wonder where things will go from here. Say what you will about Richard Nixon, when the time came he at least knew when the game was up and had the grace not to drag the nation into a constitutional crisis. If we get to that point with Barack Obama one wonders if grace will emerge as one of the character traits that’s been hidden for the last five years… Don’t count on it.

One is the fact that the 500 companies represented the index have been reporting strong revenue and earnings growth, particularly among technology companies like Apple, Google and Facebook. Another factor is that the Fed’s money pump. The Federal Reserve has been pumping $85 billion a month into the economy since the beginning of the year, doubling the $40 billion a month it had been pumping in since 2010. By the Fed driving bond rates to close to zero, the stock market is the natural beneficiary of the dearth of competitive returns. Where else are investors going to put their money?

Then there is the economy. Last week the government announced that the unemployment rate had dropped 7.5% in March, down from a high of 10% in October of 2009.  Those jobs numbers sound great, until you look a little closer. The primary reason the rate is down 25% in 4 years is not because of job growth, but rather because so many people have grown discouraged that they have stopped looking for a job all together. Basically, since Barack Obama became president, 9.5 million Americans have simply left the workforce and as such are simply no longer counted. Had those people still been looking for a job – U-5, the rate would be 8.9%, which might not be such good news for stocks.

The reality is that while the stock market may be going gangbusters, the country as a whole is a different story. The simple reason is the stock markets, by definition, reflect the fortunes of big businesses. Currently, for a company to be listed in the S&P 500 it must have a market capitalization of at least $4 billion. That leaves out 99.9 percent of all companies in the United States, including the jobs engine: Small businesses. Small businesses create 64% of all new jobs, employ tens of millions of people and are the places from which large successful businesses emerge.

Basically Wall Street is heading for the stars while Main Street limps along. This is no accident. Two pieces of legislation clearly demonstrate the problem. The first is Obamacare. In 2009 it was passed despite the fact that a majority of Americans never favored it. How? Collaboration between the Democrat party and big business advocacy. Companies as diverse as General Motors, Wal-Mart and Pfizer pushed for the passage of the sainted Obamacare because they understood that the legislation would create a significant benefits for them. In many cases big companies like Wal-Mart understood that they could unload some of their costs on the public, or more importantly, they could saddle small business competitors with healthcare costs they could not afford. As competition dried up, up would go their revenue and profits…

Just as expected, Obamacare has resulted in small businesses hiring fewer workers or hiring more employees on a part time basis to keep below Obamacare’s 50 employee threshold. The most recent jobs report shows this shift to part time workers. The April report showed that the average workweek per employee in the US dropped by .2 hours. That is the equivalent of firing over 700,000 people. That larger number of workers working fewer hours means that small businesses are saddled with greater accounting, training and management costs while simply seeking to maintain their current productivity levels.

The second piece of legislation that showcases the big business / government cabal is the Internet Sales Tax bill, euphemistically called “The Marketplace Fairness Act”. The legislation would force online retailers to collect sales taxes for every taxing authority in the country whether they have a presence there or not. Simply put, state and local governments cannot live within their means and seek to squeeze every dollar they can from largely defenseless small businesses. Big businesses meanwhile seek to kneecap potential competitors by foisting upon them regulatory compliance costs they simply can’t afford. A small business doing $1.5 million a year selling backpacks or tee shirts will typically not be able to keep up with the 9600 different taxing authorities that exist around the country. Although the legislation requires each state provide one clearinghouse for tax collection within its domain, it will still leave small businesses open to legal jeopardy from each of the 9600 local taxing authorities.

Here’s just one example. Have you ever looked at your grocery store receipt and noticed some items have a T beside them while others don’t? The ones with the T next to them are taxable and the others are exempt. Some jurisdictions tax staples like milk and eggs while others don’t – and each is constantly shifting the rules. Some communities exempt some forms of chocolate while exempting others. How is a small business selling gift cheese from Wisconsin supposed to understand if it’s fine cheeses count as untaxed staples or taxed luxuries in 9600 different jurisdictions with 9600 different sets of rules? If complying with that law sounds daunting, it is, and that is exactly why many big businesses, including Amazon.com are supporting it: Less competition = more profits.

At the end of the day this stock market bonanza should not be seen as a sign of a robust economic revival. Unfortunately it’s more like a pig wearing lipstick. It’s the result of governments who refuse to live within their means conspiring with big businesses who seek to eliminate competition. The hapless saps caught in the middle are the American worker, who has fewer employment opportunities, and the nascent entrepreneur who finds that maintaining or starting a business is simply becoming unsustainable or impossible. We expect that from government, but it’s a sad day in America when two shining beacons of free market success like Wal-Mart and Amazon embrace the antithesis of free markets – regulation – in order to undermine the opportunity for other entrepreneurs to enjoy that same success they achieved.

One of the challenges faced by President Bush after September 11th was in suggesting how Americans should react. He was pilloried by many people for suggesting that Americans “Get down to Disney World in Florida…” and that we should “Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.” That may have sounded frivolous, but the reality is, he was right in suggesting that Americans not let the cowardly terrorists cow them into hiding in their homes. Their goal was to negatively impact the United States and the American way of life. President Bush suggested Americans not allow the terrorists to make such an impact.

That doesn’t mean that there should not have been a reaction to the attacks. On the contrary. Security lapses, which would be comical if they were not so deadly, had to be addressed. From plane boarding to procedures governing the communication between government agencies, many things had to be changed and improved. While the TSA may be an utterly dysfunctional agency with inept procedures where inefficiency seems to reign supreme, it’s at least an attempt to address the procedures that allowed September 11 to occur. Other changes were put in place as well, from the creation of the Department of Homeland Security to the greater sharing of information among government agencies, both between different agencies of the federal government as well as between local, state and federal agencies. Again, no perfect solutions – not the least of which is the excessive militarization of local police forces – but at least they attempt to address obvious problems.

There also remains much to do to improve security, particularly as it relates to borders, visa control and ports, but the reality is, and the Boston Marathon bombings demonstrated this clearly: there is simply no way to be 100% secure from terrorism. In a real life game of cat and mouse, each time government ups the ante on one aspect of security, the terrorists try and find another softer target and when something occurs the process starts all over again.

While a dozen years on the United States as a whole seems to have gone on relatively unscathed from September 11 – not to discount the life altering sacrifices made by the brave military and intelligence personnel – with Boston America may have crossed the Rubicon, and indeed, just as in Rome, the citizens of the Republic should be concerned.

On Friday April 19th America awoke to the warnings that the city of Boston was in virtual lockdown. Government organizations of every kind, from elementary schools to universities to every form of public transportation were closed. In Boston and its western suburbs citizens were “advised” to “shelter in place”. The 10th largest metropolitan area in the United States, the home of 4 million Americans, was brought to a standstill by two misfits – one of whom was already dead – who had killed 4 people. In addition, remember, although these two men were indeed dangerous, this was almost a week after the bombings, the remaining suspect was on the run and there was little belief that he was in any position to inflict mass casualties on the citizenry of the Boston metro area.

So what we had were local and federal authorities searching for one man, and they essentially imposed martial law on an entire American city in order to find him. Indeed, men, women and children in Watertown were forced out of their homes at the point of a gun, simply because of where they lived. Millions of Americans were literally prisoners in their own homes in the pursuit of one man – albeit a dangerous one – but one man nonetheless, and one who was by all accounts on the run and likely wounded.

In this case the “shelter in place” orders lasted only one night because Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was found hiding in a boat. (The order was lifted an hour before he was found.) But what if he had not been found on Friday and the search stretched into Saturday and Sunday and the Governor decided not to lift the order? Would people have been forced to stay home for two or three days? What if Tsarnaev had instead hidden and died in a storm drain and was never found. How long would the lockdown have remained in place?

Today a Mirandized Dzhokhar Tsarnaev can sit back and see that with two pressure cookers, he and his brother were able to effect an impact far beyond anything they might have imagined in their wildest dreams. Which brings us back full circle to the goal of terrorism in the first place: Have an outsized impact by the strategic use of violence. What kind of a message does that send to Al Quaeda affiliates around the world or terrorist wannabes across the country? Had the brothers Tsarnaev had similarly inclined friends in Washington, New York and LA would 10% of the American population have been locked in their homes, bringing the financial and government sections of the United States to their knees? What if there was one bomb followed by coordinated bomb threats in 50 cities across the country. How many of those cities would have ended up in lockdown? 2? 10? 25? How many is OK? How long might those situations last?

A few notes to remember: The Tsarnaev brothers were first identified because of images captured by the Lord & Taylor department store security cameras – not by a government asset. Although authorities quickly distributed their photographs, it took the duo carjacking someone and robbing a convenience store before they popped up on the radar. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was found by a civilian who noticed a loose tarp and blood on his boat rather than by any government agents or assets. The point is, the Boston Marathon terrorists were found because of good old fashioned detective work and the empowerment of the citizenry, not because of the imposition of a city wide lockdown and SWAT teams pulling families out of their homes at the point of a gun.

Unfortunately, humans being what they are, terrorism will likely not be going away anytime soon. Relatively free nations like the United States will always make appealing targets for cowards who cannot win their battles in the realm of ideas. The Boston Marathon terrorist attack was indeed a tragedy, and for thousands of people their lives will feel the shockwaves for years to come. It should not however be the catalyst that sets Americans cowering in corners and letting themselves be locked inside their homes. It’s bad enough that the round the clock hysteria & error filled media coverage communicates to the terrorists a fiction that they have destroyed the American way of life and have the American people shaking in their boots. We should not allow “shelter in place” and military styled assaults on innocent civilians to become the standard by which we deal with such events, lest America become a police state and that fiction becomes our reality.

As usual, the liberals are wrong on both scores. History provides a rich trove of liberal camel noses leading to a tents full of camels.

The most famous of course is the income tax. In 1913 when the income tax was established, the top rates began at 1% on income over $20,000 ($450,000 in today’s dollars) and topped out at 6% for income over $500,000 ($11,430,000 today). Today, 100 years later, the income tax applies to virtually everyone earning more than $11,000 per year and tops out at 39.6% for incomes above $400,000. Think about that… the highest rate today applies to an income that would not even have qualified for the lowest tax bracket in 1913. And a tax code that started out four pages long is today four times as long as the Bible!

Then there is Roe v. Wade. In the run up to Roe v. Wade, liberals claimed women simply deserved the right to choose for themselves. How different would the arguments have been in the statehouses and courthouses if opponents could see that in 40 years the government would require abortifacients be available to underage girls without their parents’ consent or that government would be funding hundreds of thousands of abortions a year?

How about the Americans with Disabilities Act, which was intended to prohibit discrimination against the handicapped? What started out seeking sidewalk ramps, wider doors and job security for the handicapped has morphed into the government demanding companies allow alcoholics to drive trucks, forcing cities, towns and businesses to spend thousands of dollars or shut down swimming pools, to requiring companies to offer separate bathroom facilities to those too shy to pee in public bathrooms. Today the Americans with Disabilities Act has become a tort tool for lawyers and leaches to extort millions of dollars out of the pockets of small businesses.

Liberals may not like it, but the slippery slope is indeed a reality. What is outlandish hyperbole today is tomorrow’s reality. That is the fundamental nature of government. History clearly demonstrates the avaricious nature of government and its intent to expand its power in myriad ways once it gets a toehold in virtually any arena.

Unfortunately, the slippery slope is not just a parlor game. It has real consequences in the real world. Today there are two issues where the slippery slope argument is particularly relevant: gay marriage and guns.

Gay marriage: Liberals suggest the issue is simply one of equal rights for gays. All they want is for gay people to be able to marry like anyone else. Not surprisingly, conservatives see it as something quite different, and the slippery slope provides a compelling illustration. Conservatives say that if the definition of marriage is changed from one man to one woman, then on what grounds would the momentum for redefinition stop there, and would chaos not ensue? Two men and one woman? Three woman and four men? A village? A man and his son? (Jeremy Irons makes a valid point in asking why that shouldn’t be allowed as there is no chance of procreation.) And once gay marriage is legal, how long until gays demand to be married in the Catholic church or any other Christian church where the teachings are explicitly against homosexual marriage? (Ask the Boy Scouts about that.) Liberals of course say, that’s just and example of hyperbolic scare mongering or homophobia. Luckily we don’t have wait for history to see the chaos that lies around the corner. A Kansas town passed a resolution that would force churches to rent facilities for gay weddings. (This measure later lost at the ballot box.) A Florida judge has already allowed the listing of three people as parents of a child while a Kansas man is being sued for child support for acting as a sperm donor for a lesbian couple. Then of course there is the federal judge in Utah who is considering reversing the ban on polygamy. Liberals can call this slippery slope argument hollow, but the reality is that history is on the side of just such as slope.

Then there is gun regulation. In the wake of events like Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech and Columbine Americans are understandably concerned about gun violence. Unfortunately however the liberal solution is to seek to take the guns away from law abiding citizens, which seems particularly ludicrous as gun violence in the US has been declining dramatically for 20 years. While many Democrats are talking about “enhanced” background checks and bans on “assault style” rifles, make no mistake their goals are far more sinister and go much deeper.

Despite the 2nd Amendment’s explicit protection of the right to bear arms, liberals seek to ignore that right. Not sure? This too we don’t have to wait for history to demonstrate. The proof is already here. A Democratic proposal in Washington State would allow sheriffs the right to enter and inspect the homes of semi-automatic firearms owners annually. A new New York law allows police to track ammunition purchases and the state is already confiscating guns from people who were once on anti-anxiety medicine. Under a new Maryland law, gun buyers will have to be fingerprinted and licensed. The new Connecticut law now bans magazines over 10 rounds and outlaws the ownership of a variety of semi-automatic rifles such as the AR-15. The argument is that government simply wants to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people. Of course that all hinges on who gets to decide who is “dangerous”… Remember, it wasn’t very long ago when Homeland Security suggested that “disgruntled war veterans” or “those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority” might be terrorist threats. No doubt 2nd Amendment advocates and small government Tea Party types are not far behind in being added to that list…

Of course this slippery slope history is exactly why conservatives advocate small, limited government. Government power is rapacious, arbitrary and virtually unstoppable once it gets started. Both conservatives and liberals recognize this. The difference is conservatives fear it while liberals count on it. Think about that the next time a liberal seeks brush aside your concerns by claiming “Your slippery slope argument is fallacious”.

Well, you might want to think about running in real life, but it has nothing to do with train tracks or tanker trucks. It has everything to do with Barack Obama and the left’s train wreck of economic policy.

As virtually every conscious American knows, the United States economy took a body blow in 2008 with the financial collapse. Despite what anyone tells you, the collapse was 100% the product of government policies stretching back to Jimmy Carter and doubled down by Bill Clinton. That policy, in a nutshell, was called the Community Reinvestment Act. The act “encouraged” banks and mortgage lenders “to help meet the credit needs of the local communities in which they are chartered consistent with the safe and sound operation of such institutions.” Essentially, banks were being forced to make loans in the communities in which their depositors lived.

Now, think about that. People put their money in banks in order to save it and maybe grow it a little bit. They want more security than what they might get by putting the money under their mattresses. Now, the government comes along and says that banks, rather than lending money in the safest and most profitable manner possible, must lend in particular neighborhoods, regardless of the opportunity to do so profitably.

But of course the government didn’t stop there. They then decided that banks were not making enough home loans to minorities and decided to force them to do so. So now, banks, not only have to lend in certain neighborhoods, but they have to make loans to certain people, regardless of their creditworthiness. By 2005 fully 22% of new mortgages had to be “special affordable” loans targeted at low income buyers.

Banks of course complied, with a wide variety of special loan products from zero money down to ARMs and no income verification. And just to make sure that banks were making the loans, the government, in the form of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were assuming the risk by buying the mortgages. If that sounds like a disaster in the making… it was. The resulting financial collapse saw the evaporation of trillions of dollars of citizens’ savings and investments, not to mention sending the economy into a recession.

The government essentially manipulated lending data and created a financial train wreck and we were all forced to stand by and watch the whole thing. Thankfully most people avoided getting immolated in the flames, even if their hair and clothes got a little singed along the way.

In a rational world, having survived the meltdown and struggling to get the economy back on its feet the government would have learned its lesson and gotten out of the financial manipulation business. Not so much.

The Obama administration believes the “recovery” is leaving too many people behind. As such, it has decided that banks once again need to be “encouraged” to make more loans to low income, high risk borrowers. But it’s not just encouraging banks to do so, it’s facilitating their doing so, in the exact same manner Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac did before the collapse. Only now, instead of those two failed institutions playing the heavy it’s the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) that is putting taxpayer’s money behind the risky loans.

This policy shows everything one would ever need to know about liberals in general and Barack Obama in particular. In the face of crystal clear evidence that such a policy is a recipe for a financial disaster with seismic repercussions, they don’t care. Their ideology trumps reality. They are willing, even in a time of dire straits, to put the economy in peril simply to support their fiction that the rich are discriminating against the poor and minorities.

At the end of the day one has to wonder what is going through the heads of the people running Washington. This is the logical outcome of their willing ignorance in relation to the causes of the financial collapse. Their “greedy banks” screeds may have had a sliver of truth to them, but banks were in no way the proximate cause of the meltdown. There were indeed greedy bankers who made lots of money, sometimes off of poor people, but they were enabled and incentivized by government policy.

One would think with the economy still limping along with the injuries suffered in the derailment of a mere four years ago, that reality would replace ideology. Apparently not so much. This of course is a dance we’ve seen played out many times before. From Athens to Paris to Caracas, populist messages may bring electoral victory, but they rarely deliver economic victory. As Washington embarks on this suicidal populist train wreck, you may want to consider averting your eyes and figure out how to avoid getting crushed when the predictable damage begins…

Conditions were rarely easy for most Americans throughout most of our history. Coal miners spent 12 – 16 hour shifts in dangerous coal mines in which they sometimes couldn’t even stand. Frontiersmen built a homestead and a farm out of a thick Appalachian forest while fighting brutal winters and a tenacious Indian population. Slaves toiled for years at backbreaking work during freezing winters and boiling summers. At the end of the 19th century over 50% of Americans still lived and worked as farmers, a far more dangerous job than most people understand. The industrial revolution brought sweatshops and drove a thirst for steel, trains and petroleum.

One sometimes has to marvel that America survived long enough to challenge the British for independence and then go on to grow and prosper (mostly) for over 200 years as it changed the world. Were the Americans who carved a nation out of a continent somehow so different than Americans today? Were the Americans who crisscrossed a continent with railroads, telephone lines and highways so different than Americans today? Were the Americans who won two world wars and sent a man to the moon so different than Americans today? Were the Americans who invented the mechanical reaper, air conditioning, vulcanized rubber and the microchip any different than Americans today? Not based on DNA they weren’t. But that doesn’t mean they were the same. While the DNA of the American people today is no different than that of the people who invented the elevator or the light bulb, the American people writ large certainly appear to be.

Go back a little more than one generation ago and it seems like Americans were something of another species. They appear to be relative supermen. In 1970 there were 78 million people working in the United States. At the same time there were 1.5 million people on Disability Insurance. That means that one person out of every 53 workers was on Disability. Fast forward 4 decades and it seems as if the world has turned on its side. By 2012 the number of Americans working had risen by 82% to 143 million people. During that same period however, workers receiving disability insurance skyrocketed up 491% to 8.8 million. Today, instead of one out of every 53 workers being on disability, it’s one in sixteen! That number is particularly interesting because the United States of 1970 was a far grittier place than the United States of 2013.

First off, the United States in 2012 is a much different workplace than the one that existed in 1970. In 1970 fully 25% of the American workforce worked in manufacturing while only 30% of employees worked in the service industry. Today, less than 10% of the American workforce works in manufacturing while over 50% of workers work in the service industry. Given that designing a website, taking an order at Red Lobster or greeting a guest at the front desk of a Marriott is generally less dangerous than welding together various pieces of a Lincoln Town Car or operating a blast furnace at a USX steel plant, America should be a safer place to work. And indeed it is. The death rate for American workers in 1970 was 18 per every 100,000 workers. By 2010 that rate had dropped to 3.6 deaths per every 100,000 workers, a decline of 80%.

But of course work is not the only place where one gets hurt. Today, virtually everywhere Americans go everything seems safer. Cars have seatbelts, antilock breaking systems and a plethora of airbag options. Houses have GFCI circuit breakers in bathrooms and kitchens and smoke detectors in almost every room. Lawn darts are but a distant memory and towns across the country require helmets for bicycle riding and virtually every appliance and medicine comes plastered with book length warning label. At the end of the day, America has become a far safer place to live and work than it has been at any time in its history.

Somehow, however, despite that much safer America, the number and percentage of people listed as disabled and receiving disability payments has skyrocketed.

“ Since the economy began its slow, slow recovery in late 2009, we’ve been averaging about 150,000 jobs created per month… In that same period every month, almost 250,000 people have been applying for disability.” So the world has changed so much that Americans are now seeking disability benefits at a 60% faster rate than they are getting new jobs! That is a staggering statistic.

How is that even possible? Have Americans become weaklings, unable to stay healthy. Has some unknown affliction made us incapable of working? No. There is an affliction, but it’s not biological. It’s called the nanny state. From judges who rubberstamp virtually every claim they ever see to 34% of applicants who have musculoskeletal injuries, which conveniently enough cannot be detected by doctors, to outright fraud (more)(more)(more) and states seeking to shift costs to the federal government, the program is a symbol of much of what is wrong in America in 2013. Indeed, in some places 1 out of 4 workers (or former as the case might be) is on disability.  The worst thing about this dysfunctional program is that the fraud keeps people who are in real need of help waiting in line, sometimes to die.

When government decides to play the role of caretaker and redistribute wealth from workers to everyone else, it should come as no surprise that many people will choose to jump from the working pool to the everyone else pool. For more proof just look at the food stamp program over the same 40 year period. While the population increased by about 30%, workers by 82% and disability by 491%, food stamp recipients grew by 1,000%!

The economics of the welfare state, including the “disability industrial complex” cannot be sustained. If the record of the last 40 years were to be repeated over the next 40, in 2050 the country would have 260 million workers supporting 43 million people on disability and 450 million people on food stamps. Those numbers are simply not sustainable, but you wouldn’t know it by the administration’s push to get more people to apply for benefits.

American workers and entrepreneurs have together created the greatest wealth and prosperity the world has ever seen. At some point the spirit that helped forge a nation out of a continent and dot it with jewels like the Empire State Building, the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge will reemerge and shout “I’ve had it and I’m not going to take it anymore!” American shoulders may indeed be broad, but the head which sits above them is not suicidal. At some point Atlas will shrug, the question is will it be in time to save the country…

This is not a new phenomenon. This has been going on for decades. Upon its establishment in 1965 the House Ways and Means Committee estimated that the cost of Medicare would rise to $12 billion by 1990. Unfortunately for American taxpayers that prediction was off by a power of nine, coming in at $110 billion. And things haven’t gotten any better since then. By 2011 Medicare costs ballooned to over $550 billion, having grown by 8.3% in a year when inflation was 3.2%.

But of course Medicare is but one example. Medicaid had a similar experience. The same House committee estimated that Medicaid’s first-year costs would be $238 million. Instead it came in more like $1 billion. It was projected to cost $9 billion by 1990 and, surprise, it came in at $67 billion. By 2011 the federal share of the program tipped the scales at $299 billion!

Tellingly, before government set its claws into healthcare it tracked very close to overall inflation. Since 1965 however, healthcare costs have increased by 2.3 times the rate of general inflation. To put that in perspective, inflation would have made something that cost $100 dollars in 1965 cost $718 dollars in 2012. That’s a pretty big jump, but if that $100 dollar item had increased at the rate of healthcare inflation since government got involved it would cost 2.3 times as much, or $1,651. At the same time, healthcare costs went from 5.1% of GDP in 1960 to approximately 18% today.

This record of financial incompetence (nevermind operational incompetence and malfeasance) could never survive for five decades in the private sector. But in government, no problem, and it’s not just healthcare. Think of Solyndra. Think of General Motors. Ethanol mandates. School lunches. The fact of the matter is, bureaucrats sitting in the otherworldly universe of Washington have a long history of making decisions about which they are unqualified and ill-informed, and more importantly, disconnected from the consequences of those decisions.

Now however we are about to embark on a journey that will make even the economic disaster of Medicare look like child’s play. Of course we’re talking about Obamacare. Although there were many warnings that Obamacare would be a disaster of epic proportions before it became law, today, less than a year from its true implementation, we are seeing the actual consequences begin to materialize.

Millions of jobs will be lost, one small company at a time. People will have a difficult time finding a full time job. Healthcare premiums will be going up. There will be a doctor shortage. Obamacare will become a regulatory anvil around the neck of American prosperity. Luckily though the Obama administration is on the job seeking to ensure that it doesn’t become a “third world experience“. Which, it’s looking like it just might become. And to put a cherry on top, with our practically no existent GDP growth, apparently we can look forward to China overtaking the United States by 2016.

As bad as those things are, it actually gets worse. Your individual liberty is simply going to disappear. Many employees are now going to have to begin reveling to employers their weight, body fat measures, cholesterol levels and more. Pharmacy giant CVS states that all its employees will now have to either quit smoking or enroll in an addiction program by 2014. That is of course because smokers generally have higher healthcare costs than do nonsmokers, and since CVS is paying for that healthcare, they get to make the rules. Don’t like it? Then quit.

But then it’s not only smokers who cost more. Fat people generally cost more than thin people. Does that mean that a company can dictate that employees must be Oreo or Doritos or Coke free by the end of the year or enroll in an addiction program? How about motorcycle riders? They are 5 times more likely to be involved in a traffic accident than are car drivers. Does that mean that companies can tell you what you what kind of vehicle you can drive? How about unmarried women having sex out of wedlock, particularly minority women, where 77% of black births and 53% of Hispanic births are to unwed mothers? Given that sick children inflict an increased financial & healthcare burden on unwed mothers than they do on married mothers, can a company demand that unmarried female employees purchase and utilize birth control? (If so, how would they ensure compliance with usage?) Sure, all of this sounds farfetched, but so too once did the idea of schools telling moms what they can put in their children’s lunchboxes, cities banning Happy Meals and soft drinks and companies actually firing employees for being smokers.

At the end of the day, Obamacare may very well be the last stake in the coffin of individual liberty and American prosperity. Think of it this way… through the tax code the government already exercises a tremendous amount of influence on your life by deciding how much of your money you can keep. It’s pretty personal, but it’s largely financial, even if it impacts much of the rest of your life. Through the EPA the government influences your life, although thankfully for most of us it’s at an arm’s length, via regulation of the companies we work for and the firms we buy from. With Obamacare that scant remaining barrier between government and individual choice will disappear. Government is indirectly harnessing employers to expand its power over every aspect of your life, including the most intimate parts of it. And you can be sure it will stay indirect for only so long. Once government mandates can decide what you can eat, how much you have to exercise, the kind of transportation you choose and how you have sex, what is left of liberty? Not much… Add to that the evisceration of the greatest economic engine the world has ever known and you wonder how long before it all comes crumbling down.  Now where does one go to get insurance to protect against that?

In 1787 after almost a decade of the greatly flawed Articles of Confederation, the 2nd Continental Congress was formed and would eventually produce the Constitution we have today. What was so amazing about the document was the fact that it had built into a wide variety of it limitations and strictures intended to both delineate and restrict power. The overarching idea that powered the construct of the Constitution was the fact that an unfettered government would become tyrannical. The founders understood that limited government was supposed to act only in those areas that citizens could not on their own – think national defense, courts, treaties – and, importantly, only based on the powers granted to it under the Constitution.

Fast forward to today where their work has proven itself well placed with a prodigious American prosperity been built on its foundations of free markets and the rule of law. More than any nation in history, we have benefited from the fact that virtually any American citizen or resident has had the opportunity to start a business. Sometimes they invest their money in a neighbor’s plan to start a sandwich shop and other times they roll up their sleeves and start something on their own. More than anything in the world, that freedom of opportunity has set America up for success and driven us to achieve the greatest level of wealth ever created.

Unfortunately, that freedom of opportunity is rapidly disappearing… In an effort to ameliorate every problem that might befall a citizen, the federal government has passed laws and created regulations that touch virtually every aspect of our lives. This Sisyphean exercise has not only failed, but it has laid the foundation for the undermining of the freedom and opportunity that made America the wealthiest nation in the world.

Economic growth comes largely from small businesses. 70% of all new jobs come from small businesses. Small businesses are where innovation begins. Think about it. You’re probably not surprised that the PC revolution was not driven by the behemoth IBM but rather by two upstart companies named Apple and Microsoft. You’d probably not be surprised to discover that ESPN was founded by an unemployed sportscaster rather than one of the three major networks. You’re also probably not surprised that it was Google, a company started by two college students, that figured out how to effectively harness the opportunity in online advertising while America’s mega media companies stumbled from one failed business model to the next. Big companies always start out as small ones.

Small business is where new ideas get to play themselves out and figure out what works. This is because small companies are typically nimble, they don’t have legacy products or services they are concerned with undermining, and perhaps most importantly, owners and investors are usually very close to the action. They normally are right in the mix of where everything is happening so they can observe and react quickly to the needs of markets. Big lumbering, billion dollar companies with tens of thousands of employees and multiple levels of hierarchy rarely have the insights or quickness to see opportunities ahead.

And of course starting a business is risky. You never know if customers are going to like your product or service. Suppliers can be unyielding in their financial terms. Employees can be fickle and unreliable. Competitors abound. And of course it can be incredibly expensive. Nonetheless, some intrepid Americans do venture forth to hang out their shingle and pursue the dream of turning an idea into a flourishing business. They might get rich, but they might go broke too… but to them it’s worth the risk.

And as if it were not hard enough to find success as a small business, it’s becoming far more difficult in one respect that the entrepreneur has very little control over: Regulation.

The nearby chart shows the growth in federal regulations over the last 60 years. That growth is set against a GDP growth chart for the same period – measured by average rate of growth over the decade. The correlation is crystal clear, and painful to behold.

Each page of the Federal Register represents dozens of byzantine regulations that must be administered by millions of bureaucrats, often with draconian consequences for violations. For small businesses such regulations are nothing short of a nightmare. Not only do they have to navigate the equally challenging state and local government regulations, but they must increasingly deal with mandates crafted in Washington by bureaucrats who are professional pencil pushers with no experience in actually running a business, nevermind an awareness of the unique challenges faced by small businesses.

The Federal Register is the catalog of all federal regulations. In 1950 it included 9,745 pages of regulations. During the decade that followed the US economy grew at an average rate of 4.2% a year (inflation adjusted). In 1960 it had 22,877 pages and growth over the next ten years stayed essentially stable at an average of 4.44% per year. That was the last decade of treading water. By 1970 the Federal Register would grow to 54,834 pages and GDP growth over the subsequent decade dropped to an average of 3.75% per year. By the year 2000 the document had ballooned up to 138,049 page and as one might expect, the following decade’s growth was an anemic 1.73% per year on average. Today the Federal Register weighs in with a full 170,000 pages of regulations.

As regulation has increased GDP growth has decreased. That is no coincidence. Perhaps the greatest way regulation cuts growth and hinders prosperity is that it smothers small businesses and benefits large ones. Unlike big businesses, small businesses can’t generally afford lobbyists to influence legislation nor armies of lawyers and accountants to figure out how to minimize its impact. The result is less innovation, fewer jobs and at the end of the day, smaller GDP growth and less prosperity.

And if you think this discussion of the correlation between GDP and regulation is just a game of semantics, think about it this way. Take your income… How would you like to double it? At the 4.4% average annual growth rate the experienced in the 1960’s, it would take you 16 years to double it. Not quick, but not horrible. At the 1.7% rate experienced during the first decade of the 21st century, it would take you 41.6 years. And that’s not an anomaly, it’s 50 year trend. More regulation means less growth, which means less prosperity.

With the regulations spawned by Obamacare only now making their way onto the books we can expect even more slowing to come. This is not a Democrat vs. Republican issue… this is a conservative vs. liberal issue. As the liberal progressives have sought to use the force of government to create a perfect world where everyone lives in a state of bliss unencumbered by the sometimes harsh vagaries of life and protected from the consequences of choices, they have in fact destroyed the fount from which emerged the American prosperity that allowed them to focus on frivolous things in the first place. Here’s an analogy: In order to guarantee every passenger is comfortable and that a plane could never crash, liberals have loaded the plane up with so many pillows and so much safety equipment that it can’t get off of the ground in the first place. As anyone stranded on the tarmac for seven hours inside a JetBlue plane could probably tell you it doesn’t take long for dystopian conditions to begin to emerge.

Just as aerodynamics of flight can’t support a plane that can’t get off the ground, free market economics can’t drive an economy that is so constricted by regulation that it can no longer be called a free market in the first place. Welcome the America of the 21st century, where prosperity becomes but a distant memory and a once great people go gently into that good night…

That doesn’t mean however that the nation and American prosperity is in any less danger. Barackalypse Now is indeed upon us, and it has nothing to do with the Sequester. It has everything to do with the deranged economic policies of the Obama administration.

Virtually every American would like to be a little better off tomorrow than he or she is today. It makes no difference whether they are rich or poor, or whether they are happy with their current circumstances. Most of us would simply like to be a little better off next year and the years after than we are today.  Most of us don’t mind working to make that a reality, but the question is, how we can accomplish it.

One way many people have chosen to pursue the American Dream has been to start their own businesses. The goal of entrepreneurs is often a mix of trying to become wealthy and doing something about which they are passionate. Every single company you know the name of or have interacted with started out at some point as just an idea that someone sought to do something with. Two such companies are Subway, the largest sub sandwich restaurant chain in the world and Home Depot, America’s largest home improvement chain. Both have thousands of locations, do billions of dollars a year in revenue and employ hundreds of thousands of people. Both companies started out with one unit each and grew into the 800 lb gorillas they are today. Interestingly, the founders of both companies say that if they started their companies today they could never have succeeded. And it has nothing to do with the recession, indeed Home Depot was founded in 1978 in the midst of the worst economic recession since the Great Depression.

Both founders cite government regulations for the reason that they could not succeed. Fred Deluca, the founder of Subway says:

It’s continuously gotten worse because there’s more and more regulations and it’s tougher for people to get into business, especially a small business. I tell you, if I started Subway today, Subway would not exist, because I had an easy time of it in the ’60s when I started and I just see a continuous increase in regulation.

Bernie Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot says this when asked why more businesses don’t complain about the regulatory burdens:

They are frightened to death — frightened that they will have the IRS or SEC on them. In my 50 years in business, I have never seen executives of major companies who were more intimidated by an administration.

Although overregulation has been getting worse for decades, the Obama administration has put the regulatory apparatus on steroids and uses the coercive power of government to intimidate businesses into submission. The result is that large companies like Home Depot, Subway, Google, Wal-Mart and others can hire armies of lawyers to bring them into compliance or find loopholes through which they can maneuver. Small businesses however, the fount of jobs, with their limited resources and bandwidth simply can’t compete. The result is that big companies get bigger and fewer competitors emerge as success as an entrepreneur becomes less possible.  It’s ironic that the administration that was so quick to embrace Occupy Wall Street’s disdain for big business has actually helped big business by suppressing potential competitors.

Another way Americans seek to improve their lives is to find a good paying job. Here too the Obama administration has punched the average American in the solar plexus. Perhaps no single regulation has had more negative impact on jobs in the economy than has Obamacare. The regulations are not yet fully implemented but they are already causing a disaster in job creation. Across the country employers are shifting employees from full time (defined as 30 hours or more a week) to part time status so that they can avoid the taxes associated with Obamacare. The result is that fewer people will have full time jobs and must take two or three part time jobs to make what they would have at one full time job. That is the definition of inefficiency. From a quality of life perspective Obamacare is going to result in parents spending more time out of the house as they work their two six hour jobs with two hours in between or they work seven days to earn a full time equivalent paycheck. Even without families, everyone is going to have less leisure time to do everything from go to restaurants, the movies, the beach, play sports, read books or whatever it is they love to do.   The small businesses lose out as well. While they may avoid paying the Obamacare taxes for a while, they now have to provide the training, scheduling, management and administration support for more employees than they would if they could fill their jobs with full time employees.  Obamacare is a job killing machine, and with it goes the dreams of millions of Americans who were hoping that a job would help them achieve their life’s goals.

With a flawed government focused mindset, his administration has already accomplished what Barack Obama suggested it would take two terms to finish: “Fundamentally transforming the United States of America”. Unfortunately for those seeking to pursue the American Dream, the Barackalypse he has created has little resemblance to the dynamic America whose engine drove our own and the world’s prosperity for a century. At some point in the future when anthropologists discover the ruins of what was once America they will wonder what kind of Apocalypse could have destroyed such a great and powerful nation. One wonders what curious artifacts will remain that indicate the damage was self inflicted when the citizens twice elevated to their presidency a self aggrandizing man with no understanding of how the world actually works beyond the chimerical fantasy created in his mind and perpetuated by a cabal of empowering sycophants. Perhaps the story the write will be “Barackalypse Now: The story of one man’s destruction of the American Dream”.